Читать книгу Mystery under the Sea: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5
ОглавлениеTHE MUTE AND THE DEAD
An argument was taking place behind a door on the eighty-sixth floor of a towering midtown skyscraper. The lettering on the door read:
CLARK SAVAGE, JR.
One of the voices sounded as if its source might come from a small child. The other was suave, well modulated, one obviously accustomed to much public speaking.
“You’re nuts, Ham,” affirmed the childlike voice. “They wear ’em that way so they can get ’em on and off easy.”
“Monk, you thick-headed missing link,” said the other voice, “they wear them that way simply because it makes them look smart, and for no other reason!”
The pair who had been arguing, interrupted their dissension. They were as unlike as their voices. The one with the childlike voice, in the dim light of the reception room, might easily have been mistaken for a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound gorilla. He had practically no forehead, an incredibly homely face that was made pleasant by an overly large mouth, and arms which extended his furry hands to well below his knees. He was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair.
The other was a lean-hipped man whose garments were the absolute ultimate in fashionable perfection. He had a not unhandsome face with a high forehead, keen eyes and the mobile mouth of an orator. He carried a slender black cane, which he had been waving in an effort to drive home his arguments. He was Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks.
“You’re wrong, you ambulance-chasing shyster!” “Monk” continued the altercation. “They wear ’em that way because they can get out of ’em easy when they fall overboard.”
“Ham” waved his cane in Monk’s face.
“You have the mind of a child!” he shouted. “The fact that they are cut that way has no significance whatever!”
A newcomer had silently entered the office. A huge man of bronze.
“What are you two arguing about now?” he asked.
The two dissenters—Monk and Ham—jumped as if they had suddenly found their feet in cold water.
“Doc Savage!” Ham exclaimed.
“Gosh, Doc, you gimme a scare,” Monk said, surprised.
“What is the argument now?” Doc Savage asked them.
“Sailors’ pants,” Monk squeaked. “Any fool would know they’re cut big at the bottom so that the sailor can get in and out of them in a hurry, but this dumb shyster Ham——”
“This accident of nature!” Ham slashed his cane at Monk. “Just to look at him, you would know his head could not possibly hold a brain cell! Now, sailors’ pants——”
An elevator door clanged in the corridor. Footsteps clattered. A figure came weaving through the door.
Monk stared at the hideous apparition and his big mouth opened very nearly to its widest. He must have tried to say something, but words did not come out.
The mutilated man stood before them. If possible, he was a more hideous specter than when he had frightened the crowd at the elevated station. His wrists had stopped leaking. His mouth, however, was now running scarlet, and with each of his faint breaths he blew a fine mist of spray.
He tried to speak. It was a gurgle.
“Hey,” Monk squeaked at him, “what’s wrong?”
The victim weaved and went down on all fours, but his slashed wrists would not hold him and he fell on the floor, squirmed. As they moved toward him, he scrambled to his feet with a species of mad energy. He gurgled and coughed, as if trying to speak. He gave it up. Then he staggered to the big, inlaid desk.
An inkstand with pens was on the table. Hitting this with his elbow, he knocked it to the floor. Black and red ink gushed over the costly rug.
“Nix, nix!” Monk shouted, too late. “The Khedive of Egypt himself gave Doc that rug.”
The mutilated man was in no condition to care. He stabbed a toe into the ink, began to draw lines on the rug. It was slow work, for his shoe proved to be no suitable brush.
It was now evident that the man was trying to print a message.
Doc Savage whisked across the reception room and through a door which gave onto a library, a huge room, yet one which was jammed almost to capacity with ponderous-looking tomes. This was a scientific library which was equalled by none.
Crossing the library, the bronze man entered a laboratory-workshop.
He got a can of paint—it was used in coating the unusual devices which he so frequently constructed—and a brush, also a coil of wire for use in lashing the brush to the man’s shoe. Carrying these, he whipped back into the reception room.
Something horrible had happened to their visitor. He was a contorted heap on the floor.
Monk, who was crouching over the fellow, looked up. “It beats me, Doc,” he barked. “The poor bird got some kind of cramps or somethin’ and just fell over in kind of a fit.”
Doc Savage went to the man, bent over him, examined him.
“My instrument case,” he directed Monk.
Monk ran into the laboratory and came back with the instrument case. Doc Savage had been trained in many things, but his first, and probably his greatest, forte was surgery. He straightened from his diagnosis.
“Monk, you stay here.” He pointed to the strange markings which the mistreated man had managed to ink on the carpet. “Watch those. And try to decipher them.”
Monk, who disliked being left out of anything, wailed, “But, Doc, what——”
“Only one thing will save this man,” Doc Savage said. “We have that thing down at our water-front place. I must take him there.”
Doc Savage gathered up the stricken man. Then he addressed Ham.
“Endeavor to find where this fellow came from,” he suggested.
“Righto,” Ham agreed.
Both Monk and Ham busied themselves at their assigned tasks.
It took Doc with his burden but a short time to reach what was ostensibly a huge unused warehouse on the Hudson River water front. The warehouse was really a combination hangar and boathouse.
Doc carried the victim to a device which resembled a large steel tank, with a hatch in the end and numerous valves and gauges on the outside. There was nothing unique about this thing. Any professional diver would have recognized it as an “iron doctor.” Divers enter the “iron doctor” for decompression, after being subjected to the terrific pressure of a deep dive, to prevent the formation of fatal air bubbles in their blood stream.
Doc Savage did not open the “iron doctor.” Rather slowly, he laid his burden down.
The man had died!
Doc Savage worked furiously over the body, attempting to return a spark of life, even taking the corpse into the “iron doctor” and turning on the pressure. It was, however, of no avail.
The victim had been seized with what divers call the “bends.” Recently, his body had been subjected to terrific pressure and he had not been properly decompressed. The resultant formation of nitrogen bubbles might not, necessarily, have been fatal. The “iron doctor,” perhaps, would have saved him.
But the “bends” had not killed the man. He had died from the effects of the acid burns about his mouth, the loss of his life stream through his slashed wrists.
Doc Savage searched the fellow’s clothing, examined the body. An untrained searcher, perhaps, would have sworn there was nothing to be found.
There were a few grains of sand in the cuff of the still-damp trousers. Doc Savage examined these under a pocket magnifier.
“North shore of Long Island Sound,” he said, as if to himself.
That would not have surprised a trained geologist. Sands from different localities frequently have as distinct a personality as have finger prints.
On the dead man’s shirt, the left shoulder, there was a reddish brown smear, which the water had not entirely washed away. Doc added lenses to his magnifier, increasing its power, and scrutinized the stain.
“Copper bottom paint off a ship,” he concluded.
Next he got a clean metal pan and, not without some difficulty, managed to wring a few drops of water from the man’s clothing. He carried the pan across the building.
The interior of this building, which outwardly resembled an old warehouse, was of enormous size. The walls were thick. The roof as nearly bombproof as it could be made. The place housed a remarkable assortment of vehicles for travel in the air, on the water, and under the water. There were several planes, ranging from a huge speed ship to a small autogiro; there was a dirigible of unusual design; there were speed boats; and off to one side in a drydock of its own stood a small submarine.
From a locker, Doc Savage took a metal case and opened it. An array of chemicals and chemical equipment, ingeniously compact, was disclosed. This assortment, an unbelievably complete portable laboratory, belonged to the homely Monk, and he invariably took it along on expeditions.
With a skill born of much study, Doc Savage set to work analyzing his water sample. It was not easy, but neither was it impossible. Water in the vicinity of Manhattan contains a certain type of pollution, and this diminishes with distance from the metropolis. Before long, Doc Savage knew approximately where the water had come from.
“The neighborhood of Paradise Beach,” he decided.
That was the extent of the clue. The bronze man left the body in the “iron doctor,” padlocked the hatch.
Shortly afterward, he was back in the skyscraper laboratory. He listened. There was no sound.
“Monk!” he called. Then: “Ham!”
No answer.
The bronze man whipped across the laboratory, through the library, and stopped on the anteroom threshold. He remained there poised and made for a moment a small, peculiar sound, which was among the strangest of his characteristics. This note, a vague, eerie trilling, was indefinable as the vagaries of a wind in a denuded forest, rose and fell. It had a quality of ventriloquism, for one looking at the bronze man could not have told that he made the sound. It was doubtful if Doc Savage himself realized he was authoring the fantastic note. He made the sound only in moments of intense mental excitement.
Monk lay spread-eagled on the anteroom floor, flat on his face. And there was the stillness of the dead about his apish body.
